Lawyer's Suicide Shocks Peers In White House

The Absence Of Clues Or A Note Makes It Hard To Figure Out What Was Troubling Vincent Foster.

July 22, 1993|By Knight-Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Vincent Foster, an outstanding Arkansas lawyer who followed his boyhood friend Bill Clinton to the pinnacle of political power, apparently left the White House on Tuesday afternoon, drove to an isolated park, put a .38-caliber revolver into his mouth and fired.

He left behind no note or explanation - just crushing anguish and profound mystery.

Foster, 48, was in his shirt sleeves, slumped near a Civil War cannon in Fort Marcy overlooking the Potomac River,

when police, alerted by an anonymous caller, found his body at 6:04 p.m. The gun was still in Foster's hand.

None of Foster's closest friends at the White House - not White House Chief of Staff Thomas F. ''Mack'' McLarty, not White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, not Hillary Clinton, not the president himself - had any idea why Foster killed himself.

''What happened,'' Clinton said Wednesday, ''was a mystery about something inside of him.''

''For more years than most of us like to admit, in times of difficulty, he was normally the Rock of Gibraltar while other people were having trouble. No one could ever remember the reverse being the case. So I don't know if we'll ever know.''

When a reporter suggested that Foster's suicide might have been related to things that went wrong in the White House, the president replied: ''I don't think so. I certainly don't think that can explain it, and I certainly don't think it's accurate.''

Clinton, shaken and ashen-faced, shared his grief with the White House staff, recalling his childhood in tiny Hope, Ark.

When he learned of Foster's death, the president said, ''I just kept thinking in my mind of when we were so young, sitting on the ground in the back yard, throwing knives into the ground and seeing if we were adroit enough to make them stick.''

He ordered a top-level Justice Department investigation into Foster's death.

Almost from the time the two friends attended kindergarten together, Foster compiled an impressive record of achievement and acclaim.

He was an outstanding student and athlete, president of his high school class, tops in his University of Arkansas Law School class, the highest scorer on the Arkansas Bar exam and a partner of Hillary Rodham Clinton at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, where he spent 22 years.

Then, when Clinton was sworn in as president Jan. 20, Foster became the No. 2 lawyer in the White House.

Quiet and reserved, Foster was known as a workaholic and a perfectionist who, some sources speculated, may have been unnerved and depressed by the intense pressures of the Washington limelight and deeply upset by media criticism of the White House counsel's office.

The office, headed by Nussbaum, had been faulted for failing to detect problems in the aborted nominations of corporate lawyer Zoe Baird and federal Judge Kimba Wood for attorney general.

Foster is survived by his wife, Lisa, three children, his mother and two sisters.

Suicides and attempted suicides are rare among high-level public officials in Washington. Robert McFarlane, a national security adviser during the Reagan administration, tried to kill himself in February 1987 after his implication in the Iran-Contra scandals.

Adm. James V. Forrestal committed suicide in 1949 by jumping out a 16th-floor window at Bethesda Medical Center a few months after President Harry S. Truman removed him as defense secretary.